


fingers for crossing

by restlesslikeme



Category: Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, Incredible Hulk - All Media Types, Iron Man (Comic), Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Child Abuse, F/M, Rule 63
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-15
Updated: 2012-12-15
Packaged: 2017-11-21 04:22:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/593410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/restlesslikeme/pseuds/restlesslikeme
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Easier to have fallen from grace and be doing your penance than to be the same angry little girl playing with chemicals and trying to scratch the darkness out of your bloodstream.</p>
            </blockquote>





	fingers for crossing

**Author's Note:**

> possible trigger warnings for discussion of abuse and the psychological trauma resulting from it, including discussions of abuse involving the forced consumption of food, and for alcoholism.
> 
> there isn't enough fem!bruce fic, so i wrote some. appearance-wise, i'm going off shannyn sossamon around [this era](http://www.shannyn-sossamon.com/gallery/albums/photoshoots/67/session67_007.jpg).

Tony thinks he's seen her before; lying on his back in a cave in the desert with the smell of charred flesh in the air, or through the static haze of a bottle of whiskey. She's got that air about her, as if death and disease cling to her strong, taught shoulders, her wiry wrists. He watches, waits for a green tinge in her eyes, but just gets her smile; somewhere on the delicate cusp between " _I deserved this_ " and " _I'll crush you in a second, I'll burn this world to its fucking foundations_ ". He wonders if everyone sees the same thing, if she’s that easy to read, or if to other people it just looks sad- like the self loathing expression of a woman guilty beyond her control. Like someone carrying the weight of too many lives lost, the perpetual mourning mother figure. 

Bullshit.

Tony watches her. He watches her work, watches the sharp, straight line of her neck. He takes in her jeans, ill fitting and loose on her narrow hips, the men's button down that never accounted for her small breasts, the blazer (tweed at some point, colorless now) that gives her shoulders a false, crooked width. She shrinks from interaction, from attention, ducks her head like a kicked cat when spoken to, and Tony has to admire her self construction, admires it like he admires his own.

The bottle doesn't keep him from thinking that her hair might smell like sand (is it all the same no matter where you are? India, Afghanistan. Heat and death that fills your lungs), but it helps. He touches her where and when he can. When she looks at him he looks away. It's too heavy, too much, too close to having a hand down his own throat. The mirror is eventually going to shatter and break, slice his hands up and leave him with nothing but a fistful of blood and seven years bad luck.

You pretend to be the thing you know they want you to be and it's easier. Easier to match the star lodged in your heart with rocket red armor like an American hero than to stand up and try to tell the world what it's like to lovehateadoreloathe yourself so much it feels like dying and being resurrected within the blink of an eye. Easier to have fallen from grace and be doing your penance than to be the same angry little girl playing with chemicals and trying to scratch the darkness out of your bloodstream. 

He wonders what her mouth tastes like. Wonders what it would be like to have her fingers tangled in his hair, on his knees in front of her. Wonders if she'd let him leave his own marks across the weathered canvas of her skin.

"There was a cake on the table," Bryce is talking. Her voice is soft, it blends in with the near silent hum of Tony's machines, and he doesn't know why she's telling him this but he's listening, drinking it in, collecting scraps of her and pinning them away like butterfly specimens still wet with ethanol. 

"It wasn't my birthday, it was after. A week late. But there was a cake on the table when I came home from school," her work doesn't falter. Her hands are steady as they sweep across glowing blue panels, type away in a language she picked up within a few hours, a language Tony's spent his life developing.

"He was sitting there with this cake, this plain, white cake with nothing on it, not even my name. And he was angry with me that he'd forgotten my birthday; I was fifteen." 

She smiles, but this one feels a little more raw. Tony doesn't look at her, doesn't want to scare her off, doesn't understand why she's telling him this. "I had to eat the whole thing. Just keep eating and eating, and then I got sick later that night, really quietly in the bathroom because I was so afraid that he would hear me puking it up."

"It was lonely," Tony says. It's the only thing that comes out. Inconsequential. Stupid. He means something bigger by it, something about giants among men and broken hearts, about supernovas and being too big for your skin, too big and bright and much for the rest of the world, something that feels like solidarity.

“It was lonely,” she agrees though, and there, there’s the sadness he was looking for earlier, the parts that she keeps acting out to soften and falsen the edges of the anger. It’s grief not just for the things she’s done but for the ones that have been done to her , and if it’s selfish he loves her all the more for it. Here are the tired lines around her mouth, the hangnail on her pinkie finger that she picks at til it tears. Here is the gaping cavity in her chest, cold and sticky with coagulated blood.

And aren’t they just the perfect matching set, she and him.

He puts a hand on her lower back, notices that she doesn’t shrink away, that she just continues to work. It’s at this range that he notices he was drawing unlikely parallels, that it’s her skin that reminds him of the sand, not her hair at all. There’s some irony in that, isn’t there, that she reminds him of his own goddamn death, his own goddamn issues. So maybe she’s the only actor, maybe he really is as self obsessed as he pretends to pretend he is.

“There’s schematics over there for you to look at,” she tells him. He lets his hand slip away from her back, watches as she takes her glasses out of her front pocket and pushes her hair away from her eyes, dark and choppy and outgrown from whatever short style she may have had it before, just barely curling around her ears.

Tony watches her and he doesn’t touch her, and later he’ll drink until he’s crouched over the toilet, thinking about a teenaged girl’s shaking fingers clutching a forkful of birthday cake.


End file.
